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…Right after New Year's celebrations, the Moscow Radio's Big Symphony Orchestra got down to work rehearsing the 15th Symphony by Dmitry Shostakovich. With his son Maxim slated to conduct the first performance, the composer was quite jittery realizing that his easy-going and fun-loving scion was not the right man to lead the orchestra through the premier performance of his father's latest outing…
"Maxim has been doing pretty well recently and is fast becoming a good conductor," Shostakovich writes to a close friend, as if apologizing for the wrong choice, "Five years from now he will be older, more experienced and smarter too…"
Much to everyone's surprise, however, Maxim Shostakovich made easy work of the highly intricate score and, on March 8, he presided over a very spirited performance of his father's 15th Symphony before the jam-packed hall of Conservatory Big Hall in Moscow…
The 15th Symphony was very much about the composer's life bringing back the happy moments of his youth and the grievous losses suffered in later days… The great master also ventured into psychological territory only the chosen few could comprehend. Hundreds of people listened, with bated breath, to this heartfelt confession and, when the final chords had died away, the audience exploded with deafening applause! Everyone jumped on their feet to greet Dmitry Shostakovich who, though in pain, still braved his way on stage bowing to the ecstatic fans who were crying their lungs out in well-deserved appreciation of the great maestro…
In May, the 15th Symphony was played in Shostakovich's hometown of Leningrad and was then taken to Germany, Denmark and Britain. The symphony has since been extensively performed by the world's each and every leading conductor…
Meanwhile, Georgy Sviridov, who once studied from Shostakovich, wrote his Springtime Cantata to lyrics by the great Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov. The music was ultimately Russian drawing heavily on the traditional Russian folk idiom. Sviridov took his new outing to the well-known choirmaster Alexander Yurlov. An excellent performer of Sviridov's earlier works, Yurlov was exactly the man the composer needed to bring out the inherent beauty of this unobtrusively quiet, almost intimate, music. Even so, Sviridov spent long hours with the choir going over the score for the umpteenth time searching for and finding the most heartfelt intonations…
When, on June 7, Alexander Yurlov and his Russian Choir offered a very stirring first performance of the Springtime Cantata, no one could imagine that it was the last collaboration of the great composer and choirmaster…
On June 10th hundreds of ticket-hungry ballet fans were thronging the Bolshoi Theater' entranceway in Moscow trying to get in to see Rodion Shchedrin's new production of Anna Karenina. Inspired by his famed wife, the composer dared to try his hand staging Leo Tolstoy's timeless novel. In the ballet, Maya Plisetskaya danced the part of the beautiful Anna and also did some choreographing which was not very much in the vein of the Bolshoi's tried and true style. There were neither headspinning cross-stage jumps nor fast-moving pas here, each move aiming to bring out the inner self of each character...
"It's not ballet, it's pantomime," grumbled the critics…
"No way, it's genuine ballet, it speaks the language of the future," parried the proponents of modernism and time proved them right. Modern choreography was moving from strength to strength and Shchedrin's Anna Karenina eventually became one of the best and most-loved ballets to come along in the late-20th century…
In Moscow, the country's biggest operatic authority, Boris Pokrovsky, set up a new music theater using a disused movie theater for this purpose. He had spent the past 30 years working at the Bolshoi, under the traditionally watchful eye of the powers-that-be who always made sure that the repertoire of the country's number one theater never deviate from the politically benign classical idiom. Eager to shake off this official stranglehold and experiment freely, Pokrovsky turns to new and old, half-forgotten, operas which fit right in with his more chamber-like company.
Chamber companies were fast becoming the order of the day and small orchestras and choirs were cropping up like mushrooms after a rainfall. Many of them fell apart in just a year or two, but others were still around, among them the Moscow Chamber Choir set up and led by Vladimir Minin.
A seasoned choirmaster who had already led a number of state choirs and was now without work, signed up with Moscow's Gnessins Music College where his students were ready to rehearse any time he wanted. Picking out the more talented enthusiasts, Vladimir Minin got down to work and on April 23 the new choir gives its first performance...
Starting out as an amateur outfit, Vladimir Minin's chamber choir eventually went professional, building up an impressive repertoire and drawing full houses all across the country.
The State Symphony Orchestra wins the honorary title of Academic, which means free trips to sanatoriums and free apartments in downtown Moscow.
The orchestra's artistic director Yevgeny Svetlanov was awarded the country's highest Lenin Prize in recognition of the triumphal European tour he and his orchestra had made the year before.
"I can remember no other conductor or orchestra who have ever been as successful as the State Symphony," went a glowing review in an Austrian newspaper. "The Russian musicians have blown Vienna away. The list of musicians who have so far played in the Austrian capital would be incomplete without the Russian State Symphony and without Yevgeny Svetlanov…"
Russian musicians keep up the good job winning the most prestigious international competitions with the Leningrad Opera's young bass Nikolai Okhotnikov bowing out with a gold medal won at the Fransico Vinas contest in Barcelona, the Moscow Conservatory's chamber orchestra taking away the top awards at an international festival of youth orchestras organized in West Berlin by the famous conductor Herbert von Karajan and the 26 year old Moscow Conservatory postgraduate Tatyana Grindenko triumphing at the Hendrik Weniawski international competition in Gdansk, Poland and also sweeping a number of special awards there…
The Moscow-based singer Lev Leshchenko wins the top award at an international song festival in Sopot, Poland, with a stirring performance of a song by Mark Fradkin where the main character remembers a young soldier who died in the war and realizes he will now have to live for himself and also for that poor fellow who didn't live to celebrate the Great Victory …
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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